New Sam­sung PC puls­ing with ideas

THE NEW Sam­sung ArtPC Pulse boasts an in­no­va­tive mo­du­lar de­sign, dou­bles as a sound bar and can be pro­grammed to glow dif­fer­ent colours when you get an email or so­cial me­dia alert.

Sam­sung calls its lat­est pre­mium PC a com­puter that chal­lenges “tra­di­tional per­cep­tions of how a desk­top PC should look and op­er­ate”.

While there is some­thing very novel in­deed about go­ing for a cylin­dri­cal, mo­du­lar de­sign, the ArtPC Pulse ( be­low) is go­ing to get a lot of aes­thetic com­par­isons with the equally cylin­dri­cal, equally black­coloured Ap­ple Mac Pro.

In­deed, Ap­ple’s flag­ship desk­top stands 25cm tall and has a 16.7cm di­am­e­ter while Sam­sung’s com­puter is 30cm high and 14cm wide.

How­ever, there are enough dif­fer­ences for the Korean com­pany to avoid claims of ‘fast fol­low­ing’. The first is ob­vi­ously that this is a Win­dows 10 PC, not a Mac. The sec­ond is the afore­men­tioned mo­du­lar el­e­ment. New cylin­dri­cal units can be added to the tower, not un­like a Fisher-Price Rocka-Stack rings toy.

And the anal­ogy is apt as adding such func­tion­al­ity to the com­puter should lit­er­ally be child’s play.

How­ever, for the mo­ment at least, these ex­tra cylin­ders of ca­pa­bil­ity will be con­fined to hard drive space – 1TB HDD mod­ules to be pre­cise. Sit­ting on top of the com­puter is an omni-di­rec­tional speaker de­vel­oped with Har­man/Kar­don that’s sharp and po­tent enough to fill a room and dou­ble as a sound­bar for other de­vices like the TV.

The fi­nal novelty is a puls­ing light. Its lu­mi­nos­ity and colour can be fine-tuned and the idea is that users will pro­gramme it to sig­nal no­ti­fi­ca­tions – a green puls­ing light for email, blue for so­cial me­dia, maybe, and so on.

Un­der the metal skin, the com­puter comes with the choice of six-gen­er­a­tion core i7 or Core i5 In­tel pro­ces­sors, up to 16GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon RX460 GPU. There’s also 256GB of solid state stor­age.

Opt for the more po­tent i7 chip set-up and the mo­du­lar spin­ning 1T hard disc will come as stan­dard.

Sam­sung is yet to con­firm an of­fi­cial launch date or its price, but with the hol­i­day sea­son fast ap­proach­ing, ex­pect it to hit the shops soon. – AFP-Re­laxnews